Rick Dudley​​ is a vagabond, the Mike Sillinger of NHL executives, somebody who has filled out more W-4 forms than anybody you know, who usually doesn’t even get a permanent dwelling in the home base of the latest team he’s working for, who has racked up, no exaggeration, millions of miles on North America’s highways and country roads searching for hockey talent for decades.

So, when the phone rang Tuesday night, Dudley was already chuckling at the question he knew was about to come: “How many organizations have you worked for now, Duds?”

“Yeah, let’s do that,” the reporter said. “I’ll give you a break. Only NHL teams, not minor-league teams.”

“Well, affiliations, Vancouver, let’s see, L.A., the Rangers. Did I say L.A.?” Dudley said. “Buffalo, back to the Kings, Ottawa, Tampa, then Florida, then Chicago, then Atlanta, Toronto, then Montreal, now Carolina. Not sure how many that is, but there’s probably a few I’ve missed.

“I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve been around a long time, and it’s not quite as bad as it seems.”

Dudley, 69, is a former Buffalo Sabres and Winnipeg Jets forward and WHA Cincinnati Stingers legend, somebody who’d rack up goals and penalty minutes that would ultimately land him in the Cincinnati Hockey Hall of Fame. He used to coach the Sabres and manage the Ottawa Senators, Tampa Bay Lightning, Florida Panthers and Atlanta Thrashers.

So on Tuesday, Dudley left the Habs to reunite with his old pal, Don Waddell, once again. Over the course of their careers, both have been each other’s bosses in several stops, the last time in Atlanta when Dudley went from assistant GM to GM after Waddell moved upstairs to become team prez.

In Raleigh, Waddell is again the team president on the business side, and, who knows, there’s a belief by some out there that he may ultimately become the Hurricanes GM in the near future.

“I don’t know who the GM will be. I guess that’s a little bit of an unknown, but I wouldn’t mind if it’s Donny,” Dudley told The Athletic during a half-hour phone interview late Tuesday. “Whenever he’s been my boss, he’s been a real good one.”

Dudley will come in as the Canes’ senior vice-president of hockey operations, the same title he had at the end in Montreal.

We’ll get to what that will entail later, but the coolest part of this story is Dudley returning to his roots, the state of North Carolina where this lengthy post-playing hockey career began more than 35 years ago.

In 1981, there was a little blurb in the paper that Dudley was retiring from hockey.

The same day, a fellow named Dave Gusky that Dudley knew from his days playing in Cincinnati called and said he had moved a team to Winston-Salem, N.C., and placed it in something called the Atlantic Coast Hockey League.

“He’s like, we’ve won like three of our last 23 games, I’m bleeding money on this thing, will you come in and help?” Dudley recalled.

Dudley was on the road on his way to Florida anyway, so he said he’d stop in for a couple weeks and give him an honest evaluation.

To the players on the Thunderbirds, Dudley was somebody special, someone who played the sport at the highest level. Dudley enjoyed himself so much, he decided not to leave.

“I realized if I left, not only would that team fold, the league would fold, too, because (Gusky) was about to close up shop and they’d go down to four teams,” Dudley said.

So, Dudley came up with a proposition. He’d stay in North Carolina and try to sell the franchise for Gusky. If that didn’t work, Dudley would buy the team from him.

Dudley took over the team at the end of the 1981-82 season, and even though the Thunderbirds didn’t make the playoffs during a 14-win season, they won most their games down the stretch and suddenly people started showing up after drawing 300 or 400 a game.

Dudley says he purchased the team from Gusky for roughly $100,000, which included retiring a lot of his debt.

He became owner, GM and coach of the Thunderbirds and eventually president of the ACHL because of name recognition. In that role, Dudley was tasked over and over and over again with saving the league.

It was a ton of work and stress.

He remembers right off the bat having to write checks out of his own pocket covering $11,000 of various payrolls. He did that for two or three weeks in a row and thought, “This could get very old very quickly.”

He did it all, including driving the bus at times. To save a little bit of money, Dudley hired an assistant medical trainer … with a chauffeur’s license.

“We had some hellacious trips, so when he got tired, I would take over,” Dudley said of a league with a handful of geographically-nonsensical teams spanning from New York to Alabama. “As the season went on, I started taking over the driving earlier and earlier.”

Longtime hockey coach John Torchetti, a former winger whom Dudley drafted first overall in the ACHL free-agent draft in 1984, used to stay up until all hours of the night talking to Dudley while he drove. They became tight, with Torchetti even working at Dudley’s old sub shop in Winston-Salem.

“All of a sudden, he’d be like, ‘it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, Torch, you’ve got to get to bed. You have a game tomorrow,’” Torchetti said. “You’d forget he was your coach.”

Dudley rebranded the team from the Winston-Salem Thunderbirds to the Carolina Thunderbirds, and they turned the corner. He coached them to three league championships and one other final appearance in four years. During that stretch, Carolina went 196-58-12 in the regular season and led the league in attendance. Not a shock since Dudley would eventually coach the IHL San Diego Gulls to a pro hockey-record 62 wins.

Dudley has long been a workout fiend, somebody who still at nearly 70 years old can bench 300 pounds.

Torchetti said Dudley was way ahead of his time in the early ’80s, particularly bringing NHL-like systems and practice habits to that level of minor-league hockey and putting in a weight room.

Torchetti played for Carolina seven years, the first two with Dudley, where they won titles.

“I remember before my second year, he asked me up to his office, and I thought I was in trouble,” Torchetti said. “I walk in, and he’s sitting behind his desk wearing this purple fuchsia shirt that’s ripped in the sleeves and the chest. He’s curling, like a preacher curl bar with 25 pounds on each side.

“And he’s just jacked. And as he’s curling, he goes, ‘I want to talk to you about your role this year.’ I’m like, OK. He says, ‘You’re not going to be on a line this year. You’re going to be a rover.’ I go, ‘Duds, I scored 44 goals last year, we won the championship.’ He looks at me, … and he does 10 more curls. Just pumping iron, pumping iron. He finally goes, ‘You’ll score more this way. You’re not going to be on a line. You’re going to rove from line to line. What do you think?’ I’m 19 years old, pretty intimidated at this scene. He does 10 more curls, again says, ‘What do you think?’ I wanted to say, ‘You’re insane?’

“But I trusted the guy. So I roved from line to line. And he turned me into a (51)-goal scorer and we won another championship.”

During Dudley’s reign as ACHL head honcho, the league constantly went from good shape to bad shape. It ranged from five to eight teams, “but if we dropped to five, we were in big jeopardy because if we got to four, the league would essentially be done.”

He recalls one time a man named Robert Bailey, who made millions inventing the Buck Stove, wanted Dudley to come to Spruce Pine, N.C., to run a hockey school in a new rink he built.

“I had to explain that I was coach, GM, owner of the Thunderbirds and ran the league, so I didn’t have a lot of free time to run a hockey school,” Dudley said. “Nevertheless, the guy begged for me to come, so I drove to Spruce Pine, a town of 2,000 people in the middle of nowhere, a beautiful, remote area. I turn the corner in my car, and there’s this great, big, brand new ice rink on top of a mountain, really.

“I left there without running the hockey school, but he decided to put a team there – the most unusual professional hockey team in the history of the world.”

Dudley got Don Luce to coach the Pinebridge Bucks, but after one year, Bailey wanted out.

“I spent from 10 a.m. to 4 a.m. one night convincing him to spend another year in the league because if he backed out, Utica (Mohawk Valley) would want out because they didn’t want to be in a four-team league,” Dudley said. “And we couldn’t have a three-team league. I convinced him to spend another year in the league, and he did it more for me than anything else.

“The truth is, if that doesn’t happen, there would be no East Coast Hockey League … ever because the Atlantic Coast Hockey League would have ceased to exist in 1985.

“From there, all of a sudden, we got in good markets and the Atlantic Coast League eventually became the ECHL (in 1988). So many times that league could have gone one way or the other and somehow we managed to pull it together.”

Players in the ACHL were call-up guys for leagues like the AHL and IHL, and a lot of teams just didn’t know how to operate.

“So he was our coach/commissioner, and he made that league flourish because he knew how important it was to people and their communities,” Torchetti said.

Dudley said the experience was the most rewarding of his entire hockey life.

“Because there were honestly five or six critical points the league needed to be saved,” he said. “I worked harder to keep that league alive than probably anything I’ve ever done. It just seemed important. The people I worked with in North Carolina, the fans in Winston-Salem were absolutely wonderful and everybody deserved to have hockey. They just did.”

This is why Dudley couldn’t be more excited to return to North Carolina. After working all over this continent, his career has come full circle.

“It’s just so cool and ironic that he’s back there,” Torchetti said.

In a lot of ways, this is a leap of faith because of his old pal, Waddell. He’s a super-scout that would much rather scour hockey rinks for talent than conduct the day-to-day operations that a GM has to deal with.

Waddell knows this.

“I’ve been very lucky in my life,” Dudley said. “I’ve done virtually everything there is to do in the game, so whatever Donny thinks he needs from me, that’s what I’m going to do. A lot of people in the world don’t get me. Donny does. He always has. He understands what my strengths are and understands what’s not my strengths.

“As you know, I’m an intense guy.”

Uh, no kidding.

This is a guy who once beat up a coke machine, so to speak, during a prospect tournament game in Hull, Quebec. He pulled his players off the ice and they had to walk awkwardly by the machine while getting doused by soda. This is a guy who in 2003 stormed off the draft floor in Nashville humiliated because the Panthers owner forced him to try to draft Alex Ovechkin in the second, fifth, seventh and ninth rounds one year before he was draft eligible.

There are several other legendary stories about Dudley, but his relationship with Waddell is why he agreed to return to Carolina without even a yet defined role.

Asked what he will do every day, Dudley said, “To be honest with you, I don’t know. I have a lot of faith in Donny, so it depends on him. I’ll do whatever he wants me to do.”

Will he be the guy to make trades?

“I’m not the guy who will be making phone calls, I can tell you,” he said. “That’s the GM’s job. But I would like to think I’ll have a lot of input on said phone calls. I’m pretty sure I will.”

Dudley will remain living in Lewiston, N.Y., and will commute to Raleigh for periods of time.

“I’ll probably ask for a residence for when I’m there,” Dudley said.

But for now, he’ll watch the Canes’ farm team, Charlotte, play two games this weekend against Lehigh Valley in the AHL’s second round. Then he’ll go directly to Raleigh for amateur meetings. If asked, he’ll make suggestions as to who should replace Bill Peters as the Canes’ coach. Rod Brind’Amour is reportedly the top candidate, but you can bet Torchetti, a longtime minor-league head coach, interim NHL head coach with Florida, Los Angeles and Minnesota and an NHL assistant coach with Tampa Bay, Florida, Chicago (he won a Stanley Cup in 2010), Atlanta and most recently Detroit, is on Dudley’s list.

Dudley said he’s looking forward to working with very engaged new owner Tom Dundon, but, “Unless he wants me to, or Don wants me to, I’m not picking up the phone and calling him because he’s the owner. He’s the owner and I’m not president and not the GM. That’s a structure sort of thing. I worked in Montreal. Not in a million years did I pick up the and phone call Geoff Molson.

“To me, people that do that are political, and as you know, I don’t like the politics.”

It’s one reason he has bounced around so often.

But there’s no arguing with his success. Look at the Winnipeg Jets, who relocated from Atlanta. They’re still reaping the rewards from Dudley’s moves to acquire Blake Wheeler and Dustin Byfuglien. Dudley’s fingerprints are all over Tampa Bay’s Cup in 2004 (he acquired Nikolai Khabibulin, Dan Boyle, Vaclav Prospal, Dave Andreychuk and Martin St. Louis) and Chicago’s Cup in 2010 working with Dale Tallon.

Now, he’s hoping to help lay the groundwork by providing valuable input to a revitalize a Hurricanes franchise that hasn’t made the playoffs since 2009.

“The ACHL was the lowest rung of the hockey ladder, and it couldn’t have gone better,” Dudley said. “I learned so much there that got me to where I am today and I am so happy to be back. I have a tremendous amount of affection for that part of the world. How much I learned while I was in North Carolina is staggering. When you own the team and it’s your money that’s going out and you run the league with that kind of responsibility, there was no pressure that could follow me that was going to bother me a whole lot.”

(Top photo: Dave Sandford/NHLI via Getty Images)

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Michael Russo is a Senior Writer covering the Wild and the NHL for The Athletic Minnesota. He has covered the NHL since 1995, previously for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Minneapolis Star Tribune. Michael is a three-time Minnesota Sportswriter of the Year and in 2017 was named the inaugural Red Fisher Award winner as best beat writer in the NHL. Russo can be seen on Fox Sports North and the NHL Network; and heard on KFAN (100.3-FM) and the Russo-Souhan Show (talknorth.com). Follow Michael on Twitter @RussoHockey.